All those mountains and hills are still in someone's back yard. The only place that isn't in someone's back yard is on national and state parks and preserves, and I don't think there's anybody that thinks building wind farms on any of those is going to be allowed soon.

Define “properly”. There's the source of the fear.

But it's not really cheapest, you've just scammed a way to get your company to pay for it, probably without their knowledge and against their will. Don't forget to track how much you save that way and declare it on your income tax return, just as you would if you had a company car with their buying the gas.

Read 'em and weep:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity#United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleventh_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

No, oxygen is not involved in arc welding. Heat from electrical resistance melts the parts being welded without burning anything.

There is still a bit of loose language here, in that it is not perfectly clear whether the last clause "who are captured or arrested in the United States" applies to "United States citizens, lawful resident alens of the United States" or only to "any other persons". Does this apply to an US citizen arrested in Colómbia or not?

I think you are right that people will never go to other stars, but we can never be ready for the next step unless we start making ourselves ready. That means pushing the state of the art in all the technologies needed for long-term, long-distance space travel. The only way to do that is by having a big project, like landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade is out. Why not go ahead and dream big, and send a probe to Proxima Centauri? Watching it would require a generation mission control, because it would take 100 years of travel and then four more years of waiting for any data to come back confirming it had arrived. Would anyone even be listening after that much time?

But there is another side to this, that there are jobs that need to be done, but it aren't worth paying even minimum wage. But instead of creating more part-time jobs for kids, these things either go undone or divert higher-paid workers from more productive work.These give you either lower quality or higher prices, and fewer jobs. Those are the hidden costs of minimum wage.

Thank you. It's nice to have someone who has studied the subject in the discussion.

The only thing that is going to help many of the poor people is moving them out of the stinking desert. As long as they live in places where they barely fed themselves in the good years and starve in the frequent years of drought or locust plague, they are never going to be self supporting. But where can they move? The better lands are already full, and they, being the poor, don't have the money to buy better land.

Which must be why the first things all those expeditions were sending back were gold and silver.

And of course all pirates are happy to tell the world about it. It's not like they'd get sued or anything.